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“Sure,” she says. “Let’s go.”

But when we try to start, the batteries on my mic are dead. I groan. When I rummage around in the battery drawer, none of the ones in there seem to work either. “Jake puts old ones back in sometimes, the idiot.”

“He sounds like a real joy to live with.”

“His strengths outweigh his weaknesses. If I messaged him, he’d stop and pick up anything I needed, but he’s not great with the organization.” I glance at the clock. “I can just run to Balducci’s around the corner and grab some. It’ll take two minutes.”

“Maybe not literally.” Octavia smirks.

“Probably not literally,” I agree.

“I’ll come with. I need to get some tape. I’m all out at home.”

She hops in my car—one of the best things about Scarsdale over New York City is that stores have actual parking spots, and I can drive right over to them. “Tape, huh?”

“And chapstick,” she says. “I wear lipstick for work—need every little boost I can get—but I’m a chapstick addict otherwise.”

“Me too,” I say. “To both. I look super washed out without lipstick, but I hate bothering with it unless I’m working.”

“We’re basically twins,” she says.

“Other than the angelic voice, and the height, and the amazing physique.”

“And the unburned, perfect skin on your face and shoulder.” But she’s smiling. It feels like, somehow, we’ve passed most of the awkwardness.

“Do you mind me asking what happened?”

“I was eleven. I was inMy Fair Lady—like always—and I had to wear this wig for it.”

“What role were you playing at age eleven?”

“It was through the community theater, and they cast me as Eliza.”

“Because of your voice.”

She shrugs. “Most of the actors were children, actually. It was going to be all children, but they wound up filling Hugh Pickering’s role with an adult. There were a few more.”

“And the wig?” It’s easy to get sidetracked when the topic’s one you’d rather avoid. We’re already at the store, so I wait for her to climb out and lock the door.

“Well, it kept coming off during rehearsals, so Mom and I were trying things to get it to stay on. We braided parts of it into my hair, and it was staying much, much better. I’d been dancing all around, wearing it from morning til night.”

This isn’t going anywhere good.

“Anyway, Mom was making my favorite food—french fries. But we didn’t have a frier, so she was making them in a wok over the stove. She asked me to check on them, the oil popped and hit the burner, the fire caught theedge of the wig, and then.” She swallows. “We couldn’t get it off.”

We’ve just walked into the store, but she stops for a moment and I wait. She’s staring off at nothing, almost like she’s remembering it.

“It only got my face and my shoulder, which was lucky. It could have been much, much worse.”

“This may be a bad thing to ask, but don’t they do skin grafts? Could that help?”

She nods slowly. “We did a lot of grafts on my shoulder, which was ironically the worst part of it. For some people, they work great. For me. . .they didn’t heal well.” She shudders. “It was painful. And at the end, instead of a burn, my shoulder, well.” She shakes her head. “I could show you sometime, maybe. It looks like, I don’t know, like Frankenstein. I’ve thought about trying more a few times, but when I turned fourteen, I just stopped. I was done.” She shrugs. “No one has even been able to promise that they would make things better, and I’m used to my face like this. It’s almost artistic.”

She’s right. There are no strange ridges. It’s smooth ripples from her forehead down around her lips. Her neck’s mostly clear, and then the rest is covered by her shirt.

It takes me two minutes to grab the batteries, which are annoyingly at the very back, but I see her looking over the nine million lip glosses on the toiletry aisle on my way back to the front. “Ready?”

“What do you think will look better with my hair color?” She purses her lips, which are entirely unburned. I hadn’t really noticed that before. “Rose Frappe.” She holds up a gloss. “Or Champagne Honey?” She holds up another.

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